On Saturday, October 18, Maria Timina presented “Fabricated Legacies: How Museums Confront Questionable Artworks of the ‘Russian Avant-Garde'” as a part of the Russian History Museum’s Second Saturday online lecture series.

Museums and auction houses have long battled art forgeries. But in the case of the Russian avant-garde, fakes have flooded the market so thoroughly that they may now outnumber genuine works. In this lecture, art curator Maria Timina explains how museums confront—and communicate—this uncomfortable reality within their own collections. In the Q&A that follows, we discuss which other artworks are most often faked and how Maria collaborates with police in investigating forgeries.

About the Speaker

Maria Timina is Curator of Russian and European Art at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College. Before coming to Amherst, she worked as a curator at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and pursued her PhD in art history at Lomonosov Moscow State University. Her scholarly interests include figuration and abstraction in Modernist painting, the history of collecting, provenance research, as well as issues of forgery and falsification in Russian and Soviet art.

On the latter subject, Maria has provided consultation to museums, auction houses, and law enforcement. In 2023–2024, she curated Art in Doubt: A Critical Examination of the Thomas P. Whitney Collection, a two-part exhibition at Amherst College’s Center for Russian Culture, which marked the first scholarly presentation of dubious works of modern Russian and Soviet art in North America. She is currently working on several exhibition projects, including one devoted to a new interpretation of the Thomas P. Whitney collection of Russian and European art at Amherst College.